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What's up guys my name is Aaron, and I teach English and Spanish on take lessons comm and
Today I wanted to make a video
To help my students learn a fun way of learning English and of course that is through music so
Today we're going to be studying a song by Kelly Clarkson
and it's called my life would suck without you and this is just a
super-fun song
Every time I hear it
It just makes me want to get up and dance and go crazy and just enjoy myself
So when you listen to this song? It's not gonna feel like studying and of course
That's the key to learn any language is to make it fun. I
chose this song specifically because it has a lot of informal English and slang words, so
You might hear Kelly say some things in this song that someone told you not to say in English
Or someone might have told you that this is wrong well
It's not wrong. Kelly is not learning English she speaks English
She's a native English speaker, and this is just the way she talks
So you should at least be aware that English speakers do talk like this and I want you to be able to?
recognize it and
Understand it when you hear someone say something like this on top of that if you always use the language
That's in your textbook
they're gonna sound like a textbook so I encourage you to listen to this song and
Listen to the way that she talks
And if you try to learn from the way that she talks you're gonna sound more like a native English speaker
When you speak English.
now with that said this lesson is going to be geared a little or towards intermediate or
advanced English learners
Who can benefit from learning the slang and
informal ways of speaking in English
But if you're a beginner then still listen to the song because it's still super fun
And I still think it'll help you learn English, so let's jump into the song. Here's the first verse
So I told you that in this song kelly uses informal English and right from the very start
She's already breaking the rules
Her first sentence is guess this means you're sorry now
You might already know that in English you always need to include
the subject of the sentence so what she's trying to say here is I
guess this means you're sorry we're the subject of the sentence is I
But she doesn't say that here the subject is just understood to be her
So when she says guess this means you're sorry she's really saying I guess this means you're sorry
which means that she doesn't really know for sure and
Maybe no one actually told her this but somehow she just knows
Then in the next line were able to see how
Kelly is able to guess that this guy is sorry
so he's standing at her door which probably means that he left and then came back to her and
From that she's able to guess that he's sorry
Now we don't know for sure yet what he's sorry about but apparently
He's been a bad boy, and he has to come back and he has something to apologize for and we're gonna find that out next
Now I want to talk for a minute about the phrase take back
Because this is two words
But really it's one verb because when you use these two words together
They mean something very specific especially when you're talking about
Take back some words now when you buy something from the store, and you take it back
you're returning it because you changed your minds, and you don't want that thing anymore and
This is a very similar concept
Because the guy has said something to Kelly and then he changed his mind
And he's coming back to her and now he wants to take back the things that he said it's like he's saying
I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said those things. I take it back
Now I really quickly want to talk about why she used the word like at the beginning of this sentence
It's because she was talking about a list of things all the things that he said that he's taking back
Now she didn't tell us what those things are
But they might have been something like you're fat, or like you're stupid or
You might have said something like I hate you or anything else
We'll never know but these are a list of things that he said the one thing that we do know is that he said I
Want anyone but you so here
She's giving an example of one of the things that he said and this is
Really a very serious thing to say to your girlfriend if you say I want anyone but you
That's literally saying that I would be happy with any other person on the planet
But not you so you are the only person that I don't want that's kind of crappy
Now listen to how she pronounces the word wanted
Because she does not pronounce it the way that you might expect
The proper way to pronounce this word in English is
Wanted, but when we're speaking in actual conversations in real life
That's not the way we talk we tends to run our words together and speak fast and we get a little bit lazy
And if you're good you'll still be able to understand English speakers when we're talking like this
so she's dropping the tea out of that word and kind of weakening the D at the end so instead of
Wanted she says wanted just listen to the difference between those two a few times
wanted
wanted wanted
wanted
and this is a very common thing for English speakers to do such as words like painting or
mounted or
hunting
Like I'm going deer hunting this weekend
So pay careful attention to that when you listen to people if you don't
Understand one of the words that they're saying it might be because they're pronouncing it this way
Here is another example of Kelly's informal speech where she takes a sentence and drops the subject
Now what she's saying here is you said you'd never come back
But what she actually says is just said you'd never come back
And it's understood that the guy is the one who said this
because he's the one that she was just talking about so the subject of a sentence kind of carries over to this one and
Now we're going to go into the chorus, and this is honestly the most fun part of the song so here it is
The only thing I want to say about this line is that she does not use the full word
because she shortens it in two cuz and
honestly that is much more kind than using the whole word and
Honestly these two words mean the exact same thing the first one is just more formal the second one is less formal
Now here she's using the word got in the same
sense as the word have and
This is not a correct way of saying that but that's how she talks in everyone understands her
So when she's saying you got a piece of me what she's actually saying is you have a piece of me?
And I don't understand entirely what she's saying there
She's being a little bit poetic but apparently she's saying like
He is captivating her or just that she really cares about him in some way the other thing
I want to point out is her pronunciation of gut
Because she doesn't say you got a piece of me
She says you got a piece of me
And that's another example of how we run words together in English you will never experience an English speaker saying the words
Gut uh at least not a native speaker from the United States
That's just not something we say it's gotta all the time
So what she's actually doing there is taking that T. Sound that and
replacing it with a flap sound the
which you'll be familiar with if you speak Spanish or
Maybe some other language that has these flaps and one of the things you're gonna notice
If you really start paying attention to the pronunciation of English speakers is that T's are very fragile
So they don't survive very long when they're at the end of a word
So that's why Kelly doesn't pronounce this word the way that you might expect by saying gotta
but she sees that T at the end of the word and gets rid of it and replaces it with a flap and
Then matches the two words together into one word and says gotta and that's just what we do in English
So she starts this next line off by saying and
Honestly, and this phrase literally just means that she's being honest
She's not lying to us, but really this is just a filler word that doesn't mean a whole lot
It's pretty common to put this phrase before the beginning of a sentence and you can have it there or you can not have it
there
And it doesn't really change the meaning a whole lot
Now let's talk about the word
Suck a little bit you might be familiar with this word as in sucking from a straw or sucking on a lollipop
Or maybe some other stuff that we're not gonna talk about here
And that is one correct meaning of this word
But that is not the way that she's using this verb here
And this is just a slang way of saying something is really bad
so you can say
This movie sucks, and it basically means, I don't like this movie
Or you can say I suck at basketball and that just means that you are not a good basketball player
now you want to be careful with this word because it does have sexual connotations and
It is a little bit rude
No matter how you say it, so you want to be careful who you say this to um
My mom used to scold me whenever she would hear me say this word when I was a kid
So maybe don't say this in front of children don't say it in front of old people don't say it at church
Or at a job interview, but you can say it with your friends. That's usually okay, so what Kelly is saying here
Is that her life would not be good without this guy and she's saying it in a very informal
slangy way
And this is a way that someone would be likely to actually speak to their boyfriend in real life
Baby
And I want to talk about this phrase where she says pick a fight because really that's three words
But it kind of acts as one verb because you can say pick your nose or pick out a puppy or something and that
word pick really has a different meaning from
what we're talking about here and the
Phrase pick a fight means you're trying to start a fight
so maybe that means you throw the first punch, or you try to talk or
Behave in a way that makes the other person
Want to start the fight so if you know you want a fight?
then you can try to get them to start it and that way you're innocent because
You didn't throw the first punch, and that's what we're talking about when we say pick a fight now the word fights
also has more than one meaning and what she's talking about here is probably not a
Physical fight where you're punching and kicking and biting each other, but rather a verbal fight or an argument?
where you're yelling at each other and making threats and insults and these kind of things and
I want you to notice how she tries to rhyme the word goodbye
With fight and that's another example of a word that ends with a T that she does not
Pronounce it's like a silent T almost, so that's how she can get away with rhyming goodbyes and fight
She just kind of suddenly stops the vowel and that's how we know there was supposed to be a T there
We call that a glottal stop
So she says that she has a bunch of issues and the word issues has a few different meanings here
It just means that she has problems. We don't know what her problems are maybe she has anger problems or
Family problems or maybe she has problems with drugs or something we don't know it could be any of those those are all
issues that she has to deal with and then she goes on and says you're pretty messed up too and
A mess is just something that's really dirty, and it's not clean. It's not tidy its
Unorganized so when she says that you're pretty messed up, too. She's just saying that he also has issues
He also has problems that he has to figure out so really with these two sentences
She's just saying I have problems and you have problems, too
And I like how she says Butcher which almost sounds more like the English word butcher
But it has nothing to do with this sentence
What she did is took the English word, but which ends with a T?
And then the word your which begins with the Y and
In English when those two sounds come together a lot of times. They lose their original sounds and they turn into whatcha
like a CH sound
so instead of saying
But you're which would be a little bit difficult for an English speaker to pronounce if they're speaking quickly
She just says butcher and that's also a very common process that you are gonna hear a lot if you listen to a lot of
Native English speakers talk
And if you ever listen to an English speaker pronounced the phrase don't you there probably aren't gonna say 'doyng to you
They're probably gonna say dontcha and that is the same principle
So dysfunctional
I really shouldn't miss you, but I can't let you go
Now she uses the word
dysfunctional and
Normally that means something is not working properly
Like it's broken or for some reason
It's just not working, but we also use that word a lot having to do with relationships
Especially family relationships, so if a family is not
conforming to the normal social behavior that we expect a family to do and
If they're behaving in a way that we see as bad or wrong or they just can't get along with one another
We call that
dysfunctional so if you've ever seen the TV show Arrested Development, then that is an example of a
dysfunctional family
Because they can never get along they're always scheming about one another and everyone is just looking out for himself
So that's what Kelly is talking about here when she says that her relationship with this guy is dysfunctional
It's just not working and that covers all the vocabulary and all the phrases that I wanted to cover in this video
so if you have any other questions about the song or about English in general or about any of the
Pronunciation processes that I talked about in this video feel free to leave a comment
And I will definitely do my best to help you out and get you speaking English. Thanks for watching my video